Past blast: The lost volcano that set off an ice age

THE clincher was a 13th-century text, written in Old Javanese on palm-leaf parchment. When Franck Lavigne discovered it in a Dutch library, his instincts told him that it was what he had been looking for. Now, as he read the translation, his suspicions were confirmed. The text described a cataclysmic eruption on the Indonesian island of Lombok – a blast so powerful that it obliterated the long-forgotten volcano Mount Samalas and destroyed a kingdom now all but lost to history.

Lavigne had already been to Lombok in his quest to solve one of volcanology's biggest mysteries. There he found charcoal fragments and layers of volcanic debris surrounding a large crater lake. Now the geographer from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris, had written evidence to support his hunch. A caldera, the text indicated, was all that was left of Mount Samalas. It dispelled any lingering doubt: Lavigne and his colleagues had discovered ...

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